Antennas are used in data networks for wirelessly transmitting data between locations. For example, data collected from a number of users may be aggregated at a location for transmission over the backbone of the Internet to various servers. Rather than a wired or fiber optic transmission, antennas may be used with radio transceivers for transmitting data from one point to another in the network.
For optimal wireless transmission of data, it is often desirable to have steerable antennas that can more effectively direct radio signals from one point to another. Some antennas are designed to be manually adjusted for optimal alignment and transmission. However, such an arrangement may not work well in some locations where the antenna may not be easily accessed for physical adjustment. Further, numerous adjustments across multiple antennas may be required for optimal alignment among those antennas, which may add significant labor costs in manually adjusting the antennas.
While electronically steerable antennas are known, they tend to be expensive. Electronically steerable antennas often involve a complex arrangement of phase shifters that are associated with an array of antenna elements. The RF signal provided to each antenna element is phase shifted by a predetermined amount, so that in conjunction with phase shifting done at other antenna elements, the transmitted RF signal (a combination of individual phased shifted RF signal components transmitted by all of the elements in the array) is electronically steered in a desired direction. The number of phase shifters and complexity of controlling them to obtain the desired steering drives up the cost of the antenna, and for this reason steerable antenna arrays are typically only used in commercial and military installations having sophisticated and expensive antenna systems.